For today's #HistoryHumpDay, on the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr's. assassination, we are traveling back in time to explore the impact he had on the civil rights movement.
Martin Luther King Jr. was born in 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia to Reverend Martin Luther King Sr. and Alberta Williams King. As a young child, he was an avid singer, eventually joining the junior choir at his church. Growing up in Atlanta, King attended Booker T. Washington High School, where he became known for his public speaking ability and was part of the school's debate team. During his junior year, he won first prize in an oratorical contest sponsored by the Negro Elks Club in Dublin, Georgia. Returning home to Atlanta on a bus, King and his teacher were ordered by the driver to stand so that white passengers could sit down. King refused, and only acquiesced after his teacher told him that he would be breaking the law if he did not comply. Talking about this incident later, he said that was "the angriest [he had] ever been in [his] life." Soon after that incident, King skipped the twelfth grade (as well as the ninth two years prior) and entered Morehouse College at just 15.
Skipping ahead a few years, in March of 1955, Claudette Colvin - a fifteen-year-old black schoolgirl in Montgomery - refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in violation of Jim Crow laws, local laws in the South United States that enforced racial segregation. King was on the committee from the Birmingham African-American community that looked into the case. Just nine short months later, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus. These two incidents led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, headed up by King. The boycott lasted for 385 days, and the situation led to King's house being bombed. During the campaign, King was arrested, which ended up with a United States District Court ruling in Browder v. Gayle that ended racial segregation on all Montgomery public buses. Martin Luther King Jr.'s role in the bus boycott transformed him into a national figure, and the most widely known spokesperson of the civil rights movement.
King truly believed that organized, nonviolent protest against the system of southern segregation would lead to a lot of media coverage - mainly centered around the struggle for black equality and voting rights. He thought that journalistic accounts and televised footage of segregationist violence and harassment of civil rights workers and marchers would incur public sympathy - and he was right. The American people were quickly convinced that the civil rights movement was the most important issue in politics in the early 1960s.
King, representing the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was among the leaders of the "Big Six" civil rights organizations who were instrumental in the organization of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which took place on August 28, 1963. The march made specific demands regarding equality: an end to racial segregation in public schools; meaningful civil rights legislation, including a law prohibiting racial discrimination in employment; protection of civil rights workers from police brutality; a $2 minimum wage for all workers; and self-government for Washington, D.C. The march was an utterly resounding success, with more than a quarter of a million people of diverse ethnicities attending the event. At the time, it was the largest gathering of protestors in the history of Washington D.C.
It was at this March on Washington that King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. Prompted by Mahalia Jackson - who shouted behind him "Tell them about the dream!" - King delivered one of the most famous passages of all time. "I Have a Dream" is regarded as one of the finest speeches ever in the history of the American oratory. The March on Washington, and King's speech, forced civil rights to the top of the agenda of reformed in the United States, and facilitated passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
In the spring of 1968, King's plans for a Poor People's March on Washington were interrupted with a trip to Memphis, Tennessee, in support of a strike by the city's sanitation workers. In the opinion of many of his followers and biographers, King seemed to sense his end was near. He prophetically told a crowd in his last speech, "I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land." The next night, while standing on the second-story balcony of the Lorraine Motel, King was killed by a sniper's bullet. The killing sparked riots and disturbances in over 100 cities across the country, and King's spirit is still clearly thriving at the heart of civil rights movements today.